Is tuxracer playable with the drivers in the state they were in after installing the GLX .tar.gz? If you edit your ~/.tuxracer/options file, there's a place where you can turn on FPS reporting; do that and post back with a general range of FPSes. On my box, I get anywhere from 100-"inf", depending on where Tux is at the time (the really high framerates come from when he's flying so high that he's above the camera, and so no ground is being rendered). I've got a Ti4200.

I get anywhere from 10 in a large firefight with a bunch of bots, up to 60 or so (it's synced to my vblank, so it's capped at 60) when I'm alone in a fairly small area. So there are times when I'm lag-killed, of course, which sucks, but I don't have the cash to get a Ti 4600.

yes.. tuxracer is working more than 3fps.
doesn't mean it is working properly.
everything else is slow.. opengl screensaver, quake2 1024 32bit under 30fps, quake3 under 20fps totally unreasonable!
specviewperf version 6 Awadvs-04 30fps

Sounds a lot like the problem I was having with a Radeon 7500LE last summer. Something was borked with the card, because I put the 7500LE that had been in the family's computer in, and framerates jumped up to 60fps or so in quake 2, with no driver changes at all (it was using X 4.2 and the DRI drivers at the time).

Oh! Definitely interesting, and one fix to try to remember for that kind of thing...

What sound card are you using, and what driver -- Alsa or OSS -- and what module? What do you mean by "no sound" -- is your system logging any errors, or is it just not playing anything, or are the programs you're trying to use logging any errors to the terminal you're starting them from? (if you're not starting them from a terminal, try doing that)

What kind of wireless Internet do you have? Is it just a wireless NIC, or is there something strange going on hardware-wise? Which kernel module are you using?